Adequately sacred though they were, they were yet free and flexible.  It is impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible to recast the myth of your local daemon—­that is fixed forever—­his conflict, his agon, his death, his pathos, his Resurrection and its heralding, his Epiphany.  But the stories of Agamemnon and Achilles, though at home these heroes were local daimones, have already been variously told in their wanderings from place to place, and you can mould them more or less to your will.  Moreover, these figures are already personal and individual, not representative puppets, mere functionaries like the May Queen and Winter; they have life-histories of their own, never quite to be repeated.  It is in this blend of the individual and the general, the personal and the universal, that one element at least of all really great art will be found to lie; and just here at Athens we get a glimpse of the moment of fusion; we see a definite historical reason why and how the universal in dromena came to include the particular in drama.  We see, moreover, how in place of the old monotonous plots, intimately connected with actual practical needs, we get material cut off from immediate reactions, seen as it were at the right distance, remote yet not too remote.  We see, in a word, how a ritual enacted year by year became a work of art that was a “possession for ever.”

* * * * *

Possibly in the mind of the reader there may have been for some time a growing discomfort, an inarticulate protest.  All this about dromena and drama and dithyrambs, bears and bulls, May Queens and Tree-Spirits, even about Homeric heroes, is all very well, curious and perhaps even in a way interesting, but it is not at all what he expected, still less what he wants.  When he bought a book with the odd incongruous title, Ancient Art and Ritual, he was prepared to put up with some remarks on the artistic side of ritual, but he did expect to be told something about what the ordinary man calls art, that is, statues and pictures.  Greek drama is no doubt a form of ancient art, but acting is not to the reader’s mind the chief of arts.  Nay, more, he has heard doubts raised lately—­and he shares them—­as to whether acting and dancing, about which so much has been said, are properly speaking arts at all.  Now about painting and sculpture there is no doubt.  Let us come to business.

To a business so beautiful and pleasant as Greek sculpture we shall gladly come, but a word must first be said to explain the reason of our long delay.  The main contention of the present book is that ritual and art have, in emotion towards life, a common root, and further, that primitive art develops normally, at least in the case of the drama, straight out of ritual.  The nature of that primitive ritual from which the drama arose is not very familiar to English readers.  It has been necessary to stress its